Designs for Foraging
2014—2016
Concrete Jungle is a foraging group that collects fallen fruit from untended trees around Atlanta and donates them to homeless shelters and food banks. As a small nonprofit organization, they have limited manpower to devote to the task. They rely on volunteers to pick and distribute fruit, and interested observers to track of the ripeness of a city’s worth of fruit trees. Casual foraging will never be automated at scale, so no existing electronic solution is feasible. We’re developing a sensor that can detect ripening fruit and signal to organizers over the internet that the fruit on a tree is ready to be collected.
Parasitic Internet of Things opportunities in this frame would reflect hangers-on taking advantage of infrastructural investment made by cities and regions. Foragers, for example, could use city-scale Wi-Fi networks usually cast as quality of life investment to provide communications for their own monitoring needs, assisting them in providing food resilience in cities where a social safety net is insufficient.
With Carl DiSalvo
Publications:
- Fruit Are Heavy: A Prototype Public IoT System to Support Urban Foraging (DIS 2017)
- Designing Speculative Civics (CHI 2016)
- Drones for Foraging (RtD 2015)
